Woman Suffrage

By W.E.B. Du Bois, The Crisis, pp. 29–30, 1915

This month 200,000 Negro voters will be called upon to vote
on the question of giving the right of suffrage to women.
THE CRISIS sincerely trusts that everyone of them will vote
Yes. But THE CRISIS would not have them go to the polls
without having considered every side of the question.
Intelligence in voting is the only real support of
democracy. For this reason we publish with pleasure Dean
Kelly Miller's article against woman suffrage. We trust that
our readers will give it careful attention and that they
will compare it with that marvelous symposium which we had
the pleasure to publish in our August number. Meantime, Dean
Miller will pardon us for a word in answer to his argument.

Briefly put, Mr. Miller believes that the bearing and
rearing of the young is a function which makes it
practically impossible for women to take any large part in
general, industrial and public affairs; that women are
weaker than men; that women are adequately protected under
man's suffrage; that no adequate results have appeared from
woman suffrage and that office-holding by women is "risky."

All these arguments sound today ancient. If we turn to
easily available statistics we find that instead of the
women of this country or of any other country being confined
chiefly to childbearing they are as a matter of fact engaged
and engaged successfully in practically every pursuit in
which men are engaged. The actual work of the world today
depends more largely upon women than upon men. Consequently
this man-ruled world faces an astonishing dilemma: either
Woman the Worker is doing the world's work successfully or
not. If she is not doing it well why do we not take from her
the necessity of working? If she is doing it well why not
treat her as a worker with a voice in the direction of work?

The statement that woman is weaker than man is sheer rot: It
is the same sort of thing that we hear about "darker races"
and "lower classes." Difference, either physical or
spiritual, does not argue weakness or inferiority. That the
average woman is spiritually different from the average man
is undoubtedly just as true as the fact that the average
white man differs from the average Negro; but this is no
reason for disfranchising the Negro or lynching him. It is
inconceivable that any person looking upon the
accomplishments of women today in every field of endeavor,
realizing their humiliating handicap and the astonishing
prejudices which they face and yet seeing despite this that
in government, in the professions, in sciences, art and
literature and the industries they are leading and
dominating forces and growing in power as their emancipation
grows,--it is inconceivable that any fair-minded person
could for a moment talk about a "weaker" sex. The sex of
Judith, Candace, Queen Elizabeth, Sojourner Truth and Jane
Addams was the merest incident of human function and not a
mark of weakness and inferiority.

To say that men protect women with their votes is to
overlook the flat testimony of the facts. In the first place
there are millions of women who have no natural men
protectors: the unmarried, the widowed, the deserted and
those who have married failures. To put this whole army
incontinently out of court and leave them unprotected and
without voice in political life is more than unjust, it is a
crime.

There was a day in the world when it was considered that by
marriage a woman lost all her individuality as a human soul
and simply became a machine for making men. We have outgrown
that idea. A woman is just as much a thinking, feeling,
acting person after marriage as before. She has opinions and
she has a right to have them and she has a right to express
them. It is conceivable, of course, for a country to decide
that its unit of representation should be the family and
that one person in that family should express its will. But
by what possible process of rational thought can it be
decided that the person to express that will should always
be the male, whether he be genius or drunkard, imbecile or
captain of industry? The meaning of the twentieth century is
the freeing of the individual soul; the soul longest in
slavery and still in the most disgusting and indefensible
slavery is the soul of womanhood. God give her increased
freedom this November!

Mr. Miller is right in saying that the results from woman
suffrage have as yet been small but the answer is obvious:
the experiment has been small. As for the risks of allowing
women to hold office: Are they nearly as great as the risks
of allowing working men to hold office loomed once in the
eyes of the Intelligent Fearful?

Copyright (c) 1915 The Crisis. All Rights Reserved.

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